NETANYAHU DEFENDING ‘THE STATE TOO LATE’ (ISRAEL)

Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu surprised few recently by furiously rejecting US President Barack Obama’s proposal to use the 1967 borders as the basis for a two-state solution, in the wondrously long-running, vicious, costly and ultimately useless Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to Netanyahu, the main hurdle to any agreement here is simply that the 1967 frontiers are “utterly indefensible”.

This of course is forgetting that nuclear facilities like Dimona have made Israel fundamentally harder to defend, left instead with more of a 19th century colonial-style border.

For Netanyahu, of course, this argument is waved aside with contempt, as he and his antiquated political friends shrink back, laager style into their 1914-1918 military philosophy.

In addition to their Big Berthafirst world war-type weapons – tanks and artillery – Israel also has modern hi-tech weapons at its disposal, thanks to American taxpayers and generations of American and European politicians giving knee-jerk support to a derisory remake of the Crusades. Indeed, Israel exists only at the behest of the Anglo-American and European elite who drew its borders and supplied it with political and military aid. Why these Holy Wars were abandoned, long ago, is as simple as why Israel will abandon its colonial conquests: they generated no serious war booty or peace dividend to enthral and enrich the European masses.

Their “net present worth” was zero.

THE STATE TOO LATE

Israel, as a state, was a completely classic 19th century European-style nation-building concept. Other examples include almost all existing European and African countries of today, with a few exceptions like Spain, Portugal, France and England, and the USA which can claim a much older, or slightly more mature pedigree. These states, at their time of founding had totally different social, cultural, ideological, economic and demographic conditions, relative to the real world of today.

Many nation states of today are simply dysfunctional within a globalized economy. Israel is no different, it only came later to the party.

From Dan to Beersheba and a lot further, is how we might put the way Israeli maximalists of the 19th and 20th centuries interpreted where their ‘national heartland’ extends. Their present Land of David, thanks to the Goliath of US taxpayers funds, is of course impressive space-wise, but it unhappily possesses rather small amounts of real resources, relative to the dreamtime land grab of those fundamentalist Israeli maximalists. Among these, with no possible error, we can identify Benyamin Netanyahu.

NETANYAHU: Old thinking is holding up any real progress and increasing frustration for Israel.

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The son of a renowned historian, the personal secretary of Zeev Jabotinski considered by some to be founder of the Zionist right, Netanyahu absorbed from childhood his father’s interpretation of Jewish history as a series of tragedies. The lesson was simple: gentiles cannot be trusted. In this narrative, Jewish history is one of constant betrayal by white anti-semites, where the only remedy is for all Jews to return to the Biblical Land of Israel. Its Arab neighbors can also never be trusted, as Jabotinski preached, so the new Israeli nation must erect a Maginot Line of Jewish military power to deter its enemies forever. This is exactly what we have today in 2011.

The Biblical Land of Israel was imaginatively interpreted – exactly the same way that 19th century European nation builders did when planning their own respective land grabs. The “historical” but entirely imaginary territory called Eretz Yisrael extended from the Nile in Egypt, and ranged across large chunks of the Arabian Peninsula, extending as far north into today’s Turkey, Armenia and the lower Russian Caucasian republics, and east to Iraq. The sweep and reach was breathtaking, very much like the oil-spawned invention by Europeans and Americans, of 1932, called Saudi Arabia.

The real Israel was not founded until 1948: by then the window of opportunity for creating European-style nation states almost anyplace outside Europe – in Africa, Latin America and Asia – was closing. The colonial model no longer applied. Populations had grown too much and too fast, weapons technology was spreading at the same time as democratic notions.

The world’s economy – even in 1948 – was beginning to globalize, and nuclear power was soon going to be developed. It was the start of the downhill run for 19th century-style nations.

In terms of mainstream consensus reality, this phenomenon is in no way recognized – officially – today. Sadly, the myth of supreme military power and its 19th century land-grabbing racist modus operandi, called Eminent Domain, are still riding high in the small mental space of today’s great leaders, huddled together in G8 and G20 meetings. Therefore, it is unsurprising, to say the least, that most European and American leaders approve and support Israel.

Unaware that because of nuclear power and similar high-tech Doomsday Machines like pesticide factories and other Seveso-type industrial centres on their home territory, Israel have no real defence from attack by a rising number of potential enemies – or victims of their constant and micro-colonial aggression- they blithely soldier on.

NUKES ARE A LIABILITY

Israel itself seems to wax lyrical endlessly about its exposure to the terrorist threat. More important perhaps should be Israel’s exposure to a conventional military attack. In an era of ballistic missiles, Israel’s so called ‘defence’ is grossly compromised.

Missiles owned by Iran and many other nations can easily reach Israel’s supposedly secret, supposedly forgotten, supposedly impregnable atom bomb factories in the rural, tourism-oriented areas near Dimona, west of the Dead Sea and near the Jordanian border.

Its plutonium brewing reactors, reprocessing centres, fuel rod ponds and bomb fabrication workshops, stored weapons, nuclear wastes and fissile materials- once the ultimate proof of Israeli military superiority- are all open to attack.

LIABILITY: The nuclear production site at Dimona remains a strategic nightmare for Israel.

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If such an event were to occur, Israel would receive a Fukushima-times-six kick into the bin of history, at the flick of a missile launch switch. To be sure, not only Israel would be wiped out, but a large chunk of eastern Egypt, all of Palestine, the west of Jordan, most of Lebanon and much of southern Syria – depending on wind and weather. Under a worst-credible ballistic missile attack on Israel’s Dimona nuclear production sites, at least 500 times the radiation of the Hiroshima atom bomb of 1945 would be released, and thrown to the rains and winds.

BIG BERTHA PHILOSOPHY

Israel’s military elite are almost indistinguishable from its political elite because Israel is permanently war ready. Israeli propaganda tells Israelis to be immensely proud of their kill-and-forget hi-tech inventions like drones, with air-to-ground missile launch capability, Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions, anti-personnel, aka anti-civilian weapons, and a host of other joyous morale-boosting state-of-the-art death tech. But whenever Israel is moved by its fundamental Eminent Domain urgings, and when it simply has to invade Lebanon or Palestine to punish, waste and destroy, it wheels out its 20th century-style tanks and artillery. Israeli paranoia, a natural mass reaction to the warfare state, also results in constant incoherence and weakness in Israel’s negotiating stance in the endless farce of creating a Palestinian state.

This planned Palestinian state would almost certainly be, by Israeli standards, by definition demilitarized.

It is equally sure that Israel must see its army “sit along the Jordan River” and occupy hundreds of isolated settlements spread amidst a hostile Palestinian population- supposedly for strategic reasons. The costs can only be high, the economic benefit low, which will again require generous military aid via the US.

Netanyahu should in fact study the lessons of the 1973 Yom Kippur War on the Golan Heights before denouncing Obama’s idea. At the time, long-term trends making Israel the “State Too Late” were already at work. When the war started, the first action of the Israeli army command was the forced evacuation of the area’s settlements, which Israel’s generals knew would quickly become a burden, and an obstacle to maneuver, for their troops and tanks. The net result was simple: it left Israel with even less defensible and more erratic borders than the supposedly “indefensible” 1967 lines.

One might come to realise here that if there was genuine will on the part of Israel and the US to create a Palestinian state, it would have already happened by now.

The reality is that it hasn’t happened, and will never happen so long as Israel’s 24-7 warfare state is allowed to dominate its political scene.

MOVING FORWARD IN 2011

Today, Israel can only be frightened by the collapse of friendly dictators in the region, starting with Egypt’s Mubarak, and threats to known and controllable dictators such as Syria’s Bashr al Assad and the Yemenite “good dictator” Saleh.

For Israel’s borders to be defensible, they first need to be legitimate and internationally recognized. Unfortunately, Israeli paranoia seeps out of Netanyahu, who does not trust the gentiles to supply ironclad international recognition of Israel’s borders, and fears that the America under Hopey Changey Obama is increasingly unreliable as its international sponsor.

Probably impossible- or extremely unlikely, the real solution for Israel would be to firstly accept that it is a State Too Late. Negotiation with its Arab neighbours, all of which face their own and real problems of legitimacy and popular support, could fast forward to a vastly more secure and productive set of community based solutions.

In its favour, Israel has a democracy framework, it has an economy that even without massive infusions from the USA and Europe can survive, especially if its population falls as the stable state shrinks to a more-realistic size, composition and structure.

For such pipe dreams to have any potential of becoming real, however, Israel’s current political and corporate warfare state leaderships must entirely disappear – along with its neighbouring countries, Europe, the USA, and elsewhere.